Because even if you don't understand the
underlying details a useful coping strategy is to place the word or phrase
in your mental map of what's going on.

Later - if the new concept
becomes a bigger part of what you need to know on a daily basis you can read
up some more about it. But having a label gives you an initial hook to hang
your thoughts on. You could say that's the typical life-cycle of most
SSD jargon.

Have
you been wondering about the viability of vendor business models in the
enterprise SSD market
lately?

There was a time when most apps didn't depend on
SSDs. When users try out SSDs for the first time they're cautious at first -
but if they get good results they know a whole bunch of other places they can
also use SSDs in the future - and each time - as using SSDs gets more familiar
- the next purchase is bigger and happens quicker. This transition phase from a
"new" technology becoming mainstream is what creates a "growth bubble" for
vendors.

That's because SSD is a
disruptive market and doesn't only replace old ways of doing things - but will
create new markets that didn't exist before and which couldn't have existed
before SSDs reached a threshold level of awareness and affordability.

What
are the new SSD empowered apps?

And who will be the biggest future
users of enterprise SSDs?

That's a subject which I discuss a lot with
vendors. It's fun guessing - and
some
of the guesses may be right. But just as it would have been impossible to
predict with detail the effects of the
microprocessor and
the internet when those technologies started to become well known - it's
probably impossible to predict with any level of precision what the SSD
empowered super new markets of the future will be.

I call
this market factor - "SSD Dark Matter"

Like cosmological
dark matter - the SSD dark matter will be bigger in mass than anything which we
can currently see or foresee.

I often say to enterprise SSD marketers
- it's easy to create a list of the top 10 oems or user sites which already use
SSDs - but no one's got more than a small fraction of the list of future
SSD user heavyweights - because they don't exist yet - or if they do - they're
in stealth mode.

They can see us - however - and if you're looking in
today - then Hi!

The SSD Dark Matter Market is one of the
reasons I urge all SSD companies to put more info about what they do on the
visible web.

Be clearer explaining what you do.

Don't hide
silly obvious stuff behind log-ins and NDAs.

And improve your
online
signposting. You're just one among hundreds of SSD companies - so to make
it easier for the dark matter people to find you.

The new startups
don't have the time or patience to follow your tangled old marketing
communication threads.

Today, tomorrow and the next unknowable 5 years are the good old
days for them.

But here's the good part. And you can do something about it.

If the dark matter SSD people like your SSD technology and place it at the
heart of their own launch platforms - they could make you seriously rich.

The SSD Dark Matter impact is why the SSD market will grow to be many
times bigger than anyone with a sane spreadsheet could possibly expect.

Later:-
at the time of writing this blog I was thinking of the web scale companies, the
cloud infrastructuralists, and the real time analytics jocks who would change
retail, advertising, intelligence and all kinds of data upcycling leveraged
activities which previously had been technically impossible to monetize because
data processing was too slow and the reach of memory-like latencies were too
small.

Looks like we're getting there as many
storage taliers now
agree that some of these Dark Matter SSD companies are already bigger (use
more SSDs) than the world's historically best known 2, 3 and 4 letter named
enterprise storage companies. Here are some more articles in the "SSD thought leadership"
series - which have appeared on the home page of StorageSearch.com

Smaller nuances of user
behavior (which are easier to discern as patterns in a stable market) easily get
lost under the noise created by headline technology changes and the market's
apparent willingness to slaughter and discard once loved past industry leaders.

We're now nearing a pivotal
point in the enterprise SSD market where the long held assumptions I helped to
encourage (especially how many leading systems vendors there will be in the
market at the same time) are about to be change dramatically.